At my 8th grade lunch table, we compared hands, budding palm readers, one and all. Marcus Pappas blurted out “Cann’s and mine look like old lady hands.” He had a point—thin and boney—but it irked me that he said this out loud. Marcus died thirty-five years ago while still good looking, except, I suppose, his hands. My hands resemble weathered saddle bags, scarred and spotted with tea stains. Still thin and boney, add wrinkly now too. Veins squiggle beneath the surface like caffeinated worms.
I last saw Marcus at Tilden pool in the mid-eighties. My neighborhood had two pools with competing vibes. To me, Tilden seemed the more laid-back pool. And, it had a swim team. Tilden pool attracted the athletic families. The other pool, Old Farm, is where the rich kids went to bask in the sun. My family wasn’t rich, but we weren’t athletic either.
Tilden threw annual parties on the Fourth of July. Beers, burgers, a greased watermelon in the center of the pool for the teenage boys to fight over. Drew invited me as a guest one year. Drew’s family were Swimmers—note the capital “S.” When he teamed up with my brother and me on a triathlon relay team, Drew’s leg was the ocean swim. Tilden families! His older brother coaches swimming to this day.
We were just out of college, still living at home. Drew guarded at the pool on weekends, and I settled into the job I loathed for the next ten years. Marcus showed up at the party. His feet were messed up, misshapen, apparent through his heavy black boots. He walked using metal crutches with forearm cuffs. Dark glasses shielded his unseeing eyes. He roughhoused with his service dog on a grassy hill, the two of them smiling, juking, and rolling around. Much of the crowd looked on. My vocabulary still underdeveloped, I didn’t yet know the word, but I understood performative when I saw it. Marcus wore a goatee, and his wavy hair flipped up at the bottom of his ears. A beautiful boy at the end of his life.
~
In my first weeks of college, I looked to qualify the growing internal ill-ease that washed over me. I charred my knuckles on my desk lamp’s molten metal shade. I sparred with a fire alarm box, punching out the safety glass. I plucked the shards from under my skin to hide the evidence of my crime. I held the glowing ember of a lit cigarette against the back of my hand in a deserted minor league ball park. My friend O looked on, his expression inscrutable. Thanksgiving break, my mother clenched my scabbed hands and tried to read my mind.
~
In the final weeks of my junior year, I punched an oak tree leaving my knuckles rough and swollen. I sneaked out of a mixer early, too self-conscious to talk or dance with my date, I abandoned her for the night. I craved destruction. Not the tree, though, it was four feet wide. A week later, a different tree, a twin, a couple dozen yards away, crashed to the ground on a sunny afternoon. Across campus, drinking beer on the lawn, we looked to the heavens and wondered about thunder from a blue sky. Had I punched that tree, I could have claimed victory when it fell. I couldn’t untwist the cap from a plastic Pepsi bottle for years. Arthritis flares when I make a fist.
~
Susan spotted a porch glider as we drove past a junk shop. The aluminum frame seemed sound, but the wooden seats rotted through, the hardware fused with rust. We crammed it in the back of our Subaru on a fifteen-dollar investment. Susan took the kids to Storytime at the library while I took a reciprocating saw to the glider, cutting off the useless parts. Dripping with sweat as I hacked away at rotten wood and rusted metal, my hand slipped into the oscillating blade, slicing off an unnecessary chunk from the end of my index finger.
Assessing the damage under a running faucet, I could see the wound wasn’t stitchable, and it didn’t seem to impact the function of my finger, just the shape. I wrapped it in paper towels and focused on dismantling the glider before Susan and our kids got home.
~
The skin surrounding my right thumb is numb from the joint in the center of my hand to its very tip. It’s a bizarre lingering result of a dramatic over-the-handlebars mountain bike crash. In the time since, my dislocated shoulder has hurt and slowly healed, but my tingly thumb never improved. It’s annoying and it causes me to drop stuff. The surgeon says he can’t fix it, and he says no, it won’t get better with time. As an ironic insult, despite the surface numbness, I’m often left with shooting pains deep inside after I grip something for an extended period of time.
William Shakespeare popularized the saying the eyes are the window to the soul. That might be true for him, but for me, apparently, it’s my hands. They tell my story, draw a map of my past—a lifetime of dis-ease, recklessness and bad luck. Of course, it would be nice if my hands weren’t so chewed up, achy and numb, but wishing for that is wishing against the person I am today. We are the sum of our triumphs and mistakes.
Timeline: June 16: Original post released, changes made to Pro plan and Ultra introduced, Teams plans unchanged. June 30: We updated the original post and our pricing page to improve their clarity. July 4: We want to apologize and provide more details in this post. https://cursor.com/cn/blog/june-2025-pricing
Subject: Question About Unexpected Usage Charges and Refund Request
Dear Cursor Support Team,
Hello,
I am a loyal user of Cursor and writing to seek clarification regarding a recent charge on my account.
I confirmed I have an active Pro subscription, but noticed a $20+ charge between [Start Date] and [End Date]. It appeared while my subscription was active, and I couldn't find clear information on the pricing page to explain this.
Could you kindly investigate this charge (Account Email: [Your Email]) and let me know if it was valid? If not, I’d appreciate a refund.
Thanks in advance, and also a small suggestion: please consider making usage charges more visible or easier to understand from the dashboard.
Looking forward to your reply!
✨总结：多看账单没坏处！
这波白嫖（咳）退款体验还是挺好的，也更了解了 Cursor 的计费逻辑。
用 AI 工具还是得“勤查账 + 多沟通”～ 如果你也最近被扣了点莫名其妙的钱，别犹豫，发个邮件要回来就对了！
和 Jerry 聊了聊柴小协，他喜欢海菲兹的版本，而我更喜欢珍妮杨森，最近推荐给了好多人，估计有几个人的古典音乐入门应该就是通过我的推荐了。回到房间，把那瓶红酒开了，边喝边继续干活，突然很有干劲，脑海里想到的是 Work hard play hard，我总是 play 太 hard。夜里又处理了下运营工作，今天就这样结束吧。
